A 61-month grid queue is now a line item for companies that own no data centres

Sixty-one months is not a forecast. It is what happened to the projects that reached commercial operation last year, which means it describes a queue those projects joined around 2020 ^[2]. Berkeley Lab is blunter than its own average: completion rates are generally low and wait times remain long ^[5], and a substantial number of projects withdraw before they ever connect ^[6]. Read the 2,061 GW accordingly. It is a stack of applications, not a pipeline of supply ^[1].

Push the arithmetic forward and the planning problem gets specific. A request filed in 2026, moving at the pace of projects finished in 2025, is a generating asset around 2031 ^[18]. That assumes the queue does not get slower, and according to the Forbes report the queues and waiting times are doubling ^[7].

The part worth arguing with is how that delay reaches a company that has never applied for anything. Bill Tai, founding chairman of Hut8 and a member of ATLAS, puts it as displacement rather than escape: firms without their own data centres have moved the energy problem upstream, where they cannot see it ^[8]. His mechanism is that every cloud and AI vendor is competing for capacity on the same slow, monopoly-controlled grid, so when a provider cannot get new generation interconnected for years, the cost resurfaces as higher compute pricing, rationed access, or a delayed product rollout ^[9]. Tai's phrasing is that the company never touches a power line but inherits the consequences ^[10]. None of those three outcomes arrives on an invoice labelled "interconnection".

Ioana Hreninciuc of Runware describes the same bill split in two: buyers amortise large data centres built for traditional servers, whose legacy GPU and cooling arrangements are inefficient for AI, and then pay a scarcity premium on top because capacity itself is short ^[11][12].

Both accounts come from companies that sell the detour. Hut8 is an energy infrastructure and compute platform ^[8]. Critical Loop sells behind-the-meter power, on-site storage and flexible microgrids ^[14]. Runware has announced the Sonic Inference Pod, a container-sized data centre that needs no grid interconnection at all ^[13]. That does not make the queue data wrong; Berkeley Lab is not selling anything. It does mean the interesting number is missing. The report gives no price, no lead time and no fuel source for any of these alternatives, and a pod that skips interconnection still has to be powered by something. Until those figures exist in public, "bypassing the queue" is a procurement conversation with only one side costed: the five years you avoid, not the premium you accept instead.